Today, we mark the 150th anniversary of the first Battle of Bull Run (called the First Manassas by the South), which was fought on July 21, 1861. Both this battle and a second battle of Bull Run, which occurred on August 29-30, 1862, gave military advantage to the Confederacy—an advantage underscored by the fact that Manassas was an important railroad junction. Read the rest of this entry »

Vicksburg, Mississippi, saw some of the most terrible fighting of the American Civil War. Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkansas, gave rise to some of the most memorable scenes of the struggle for civil rights a century later. Both places are part of the American national parks system. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage is a case study in overcoming one's demons to find the better—or at least braver—angels of our nature. John Huston's 1951 film starred one of the bravest men who ever lived, a young Texan named Audie Murphy. Read the rest of this entry »

Today marks the 146th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Shot just five days after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln is often called the final casualty of the American Civil War. Read the rest of this entry »

Buster Keaton's The General, based on a real incident in the Civil War, was one of the last films of the silent era. It was not well liked when it first appeared, but it is now considered a classic—and even a masterpiece. Read the rest of this entry »

Edward Zwick's 1989 film Glory recounts the history of the 54th Massachusetts, perhaps the best known of all the African American units that fought for the Union during the Civil War. Read the rest of this entry »

When war broke out on April 12, 1861, it marked the end of futile efforts to find a last-minute solution to the secession crisis. The seven states that had left the Union were not ready to come back, and Lincoln refused to concede the legitimacy of secession or to abandon the Republican platform opposing the extension of slavery, so the chances of working something out were not good. Yet Lincoln believed that time could calm things down, and he designed his inaugural address with that goal in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Like any people, Americans tend to give an outsized importance to their own history; it migh be useful for us to recognize that the American Civil War was not the largest going concern even in its own era. But we might also take heart from the fact that the bloodiest of our conflicts proved less severe than the traumas faced by other peoples, and that even in the typhoon of violence unleashed by the Civil War, restraint and mercy might still be found at the eye of the storm. Read the rest of this entry »

It is long past time to put to rest the myth that secession and the Civil War turned on states' rights and to recognize the contradiction at the heart of the Confederacy’s approach to this issue. Read the rest of this entry »

It was 150 years ago today that the American Civil War officially began. Though Fort Sumter was the official start of the war, it was but one of many battles leading to the war. When the framers of the Constitution gathered, they punted the slavery question to future generations, agreeing to both the three-fifth compromise (in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for representation, thereby increasing the political clout of the slaveholding South) and prohibiting Congress from prohibiting the slave trade for 20 years; further compromises—the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—all vainly attempted to bridge the gap between North and South and forestall the possibility of Civil War. Read the rest of this entry »